Secrets Read online

  ‘Youngish. We went through our training together, parted for a bit and then ended up working in the same place. The rest, as they say. You never married?’

  ‘No, I had my moments, but. Funny, a friend of mine died not long ago. He was older than me, but there was a time when, well, you know?’

  His name wasn’t Arthur Fields, or something, was it? Naomi thought. ‘What did he die of?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, he had cancer. He went into remission for a while, but in the end, there was nothing anyone could do. It’s a common enough story, I suppose, but it still hurts when it happens to someone you know. Right, off to town then,’ Liz finished, brightly.

  ‘I’ll get my things,’ Naomi said. ‘And get Napoleon’s harness on.’

  They had touched on something, Naomi thought, that Liz did not want to talk about. Everyone, it seemed, had their secrets; their wounds. She wondered, briefly, what Gregory’s were and then decided that she probably didn’t want to know.

  ‘You remember that first night,’ Annie said. ‘Down in the bunker beneath the railway station. I was so scared and you just seemed so calm. So –’ she laughed – ‘so you.’

  ‘I remember,’ Nathan told her. ‘Bonnie had said I’d probably be getting some company. I didn’t want company. I especially didn’t want the company of a girl. I just wanted to play my game and be left alone.’

  Annie reached for his hand and held it, briefly. Nathan didn’t welcome physical contact, even now, but she could get away with it so long as she didn’t overstep his boundaries. She wondered if Nathan would ever be able to deal with a normal relationship – whatever that might mean in Nathan’s case. He seemed to rejoice when other people settled into some kind of steady pattern; it had pleased him, immensely, when she had found and fallen for Bob, but a Nathan relationship, well that would require a very unusual kind of person to maintain.

  ‘I was so scared,’ she said again. ‘And cold.’

  Nathan returned her touch, squeezing her fingers gently and she knew he remembered just as well as she did. Probably even better, in fact. Nathan remembered in almost photographic detail.

  ‘You were shivering,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t realize it. Then you went into the other room and put on the clothes they had given you. When you came out, I took one of the blankets from the bunk and wrapped it round you and then I got another, but you were still cold.’

  So he had put his game away, Annie recalled. Saving and switching off carefully and then he’d sat down on the bunk beside her and wrapped his long arms around both her and the blankets and he’d held her really tight. Eventually, they’d fallen asleep, curled up together on the narrow bunk and had woken only when, hours later, someone had brought them food. She’d not understood, at the time, just how hard that had been for him, of why Edward had been so surprised. Nathan touched no one. He avoided even casual contact as a rule. But it had been the start of a bond that had lasted ever since that night and Annie figured that she and Nathan probably understood one another better than anyone else in the world. That he probably loved her more than anyone else too, with the possible exception of Bob.

  She thought about her parents. Her father, it turned out, had been shot, though it had been a couple of years before she discovered the exact circumstances. And she had never been able to put him in a grave; his body lost among the rubble and debris. Her mother had died in a fire. Their home set alight by insurgents, along with half the other houses in the old town where they’d lived. Annie had always tried to believe her mother had been dead before the flames found her. Annie had been at school when the first of the rockets hit and the teacher had led them all into what shelter could be found. Half her classmates had died in the next blast. Annie had run. She could remember little after that until someone had found her, a man who worked with her father and then there had been Edward and Nathan and Clay. Clay, who had fed her need for revenge, though he had called it justice; Nathan who had shown her that none of that really mattered and Edward, steadfast and quiet, always in the background, always there, always reminding her to question the facts and challenge the opinions. Whoever it was that put them forward.

  ‘We have to kill him, don’t we?’ She didn’t have to say his name. Nathan knew she meant Clay.

  ‘I think that’s likely,’ Nathan said. ‘But it won’t be easy, even now.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Molly poked around in the storage locker, opening boxes and drawers and going through the motions of a thorough search but it was evident to Alec that she had decided within seconds that nothing was missing and her efforts were just for their benefit.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said finally. ‘There is nothing missing. There wasn’t a lot here to start with. Just things I couldn’t be bothered with back at the house.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Barnes asked her.

  ‘Of course I am. You think I don’t know what I left here?’

  ‘It’s easy to forget,’ Barnes persisted and Alec gave him full marks for nerve. ‘Did you keep an inventory?’

  Molly froze him with a look. ‘Have we finished?’

  Barnes shrugged. ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘A man almost died because someone thought you had something of value here, Mrs Chambers. Perhaps you could look again.’

  ‘I don’t lie and I don’t make mistakes,’ Molly told him coldly. ‘I spent my life travelling, ergo I spent my life keeping track of my possessions. Can we go now?’

  ‘Yes, we can go now.’

  Molly preceded them and waited impatiently outside beside the car. Alec could see that she was agitated about something.

  ‘Where now?’ he asked.

  ‘Lunch,’ Molly said. ‘Old bones need regular feeding.’

  Barnes bristled. ‘How well did you know Joseph Bern?’ he asked. ‘And if you knew him, does that also mean you were acquainted with Messrs Hayes and Gilligan?’

  Molly eyed him suspiciously. ‘I met them,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  Barnes seemed to be making up his mind about something. ‘Look,’ he said finally. ‘It’s not escaped my notice that the pair of you, you and Alec, have certain levels of experience, shall we say, that fall outside of what is normally in the remit of the average copper.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I could do with that expertise and experience. I’ll buy you lunch, but first of all I want you and Alec to come with me.’

  ‘Come with you, where?’

  ‘To the offices of Gilligan and Hayes. I want you to take a look, see if anything strikes you as strange.’

  Barnes would have missed that half-smile, but Alec did not. He was well used to monitoring those fleeting expressions. Molly wanted that, Alec thought. If Barnes had not suggested it then he was sure she would have done.

  ‘I’ll look,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know what I’ll be able to tell you that your experts couldn’t.’

  Barnes held the car door open and Molly packed herself inside, setting the bags she carried carefully on her lap.

  ‘What do you have in there?’ Alec asked her, indicating the document case.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Alec. Look. In case I got bored on the journey.’ She half withdrew an arty magazine with a glossy cover. Apparently it featured an article of a restoration in Venice and something about a biennial.

  ‘And there’s this.’ She let the magazine slip back and took out a complicated looking knitting pattern. ‘I used to knit, if you remember.’

  Alec winced at the memory of itchy, cable knit sweaters and his mother’s insistence that he wear them at least once. ‘I remember,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I thought I’d get my old patterns out, have a read through and see if I could still remember how. Some people appreciated my efforts, even when you didn’t.’

  Alec, put firmly in his place, closed her door and slid into the rear passenger seat.

  The offices of Gilligan and Hayes were more impressive than Alec had anticipated. The
y took up two floors of a Victorian terrace beneath which was a small but expensive-looking antique shop.

  Antiques, again, Alec thought. He wondered if they stocked Oriental porcelain.

  Barnes led the way up the stairs and into a spacious external office. A modern, but quite expensive-looking desk faced the door, angled slightly so it was set at a diagonal against the corner of the room. Next to that was a wooden filing cabinet and three chairs had been set against the wall, alongside a surprisingly domestic-looking sideboard and a surprisingly cheap-looking coffee table. The sideboard was set out with cups and tall, brushed steel hot water flasks, the sort Alec associated with the worst kind of conference seminars. He glanced out of the window and looked down on to a street busy with cars and shoppers and he wondered how Naomi and Liz were doing with their shopping. He realized that, much as he hated that particular activity, he’d much rather have been selecting the right shade of lipstick with his wife – and, as usual, getting it wrong – than standing here, in this tidy room, with his pretend aunt and a increasingly desperate detective inspector, stuck in the middle of a murder case Alec knew instinctively Barnes was not going to solve.

  That random and somewhat illogical thought took Alec by surprise and he wondered where it had come from. It wasn’t that he doubted Barnes’s competence or his persistence, Alec realized, it was more the sense that this was bigger, more complex and went higher up the pay scale than anything a mere DI was able to get to grips with. He glanced back down at the busy street, and feeling suddenly vertiginous, moved away from the window. The sudden feeling of dizzy dislocation, Alec knew, had nothing to do with the height of the building or the distance, not actually so great, from the street below. It was more to do with the sudden understanding that someone, or a group of someones, were just allowing the likes of Barnes and of Alec himself to go through the motions of an investigation. To satisfy the public and media demand that these things should be solved and dealt with, but that nothing they actually did would make a fractional difference to the shadow world that actually dealt with matters like this. The likes of Gilligan and Hayes and Gregory and even Molly inhabited what Alec was starting to think of as an almost parallel universe. One that occasionally impinged upon the consciousness of the rest; of what Alec thought of as the ordinary world, the normal population. When that happened, it was all a question of damage control. Alec wondered just who was pulling the strings this time, then decided that, unlike Gregory, he really, truly didn’t give a damn.

  ‘I want to start upstairs,’ Molly said.

  ‘Gilligan’s office,’ Barnes told her.

  They all trooped up the final flight of stairs. No disabled access, Alec noted wryly.

  ‘Toilets off to the right,’ Barnes said, ‘and Gilligan’s office to the left.’ He opened the door and stood back to let Alec and Molly inside. For a couple of minutes, Molly stood just inside the door and just looked. She had the attitude, Alec realized, of an officer first attending a crime scene. He could hear his old boss telling him, just stand and look, Alec. And don’t forget the ground beneath your feet. Just because everyone else might have clod-hopped over it, doesn’t mean there isn’t something they might have missed.

  Barnes stood uncomfortably in the doorway, watching as Molly eventually moved into the room.

  ‘OK to touch things?’ Alec asked, thinking he ought to check before she did.

  ‘Yes, just watch out for the fingerprint powder, Mrs Chambers. It’s a sod to wash out of clothes.’

  Molly nodded. She was looking at Gilligan’s desk. An ugly, heavy affair, with carved panels and a green leather top. There were a few papers in a wooden in-tray and a small, rather pretty art deco clock with an enamelled dial. A brass pen tray filled with very ordinary biro pens and a blotter that suggested Gilligan might have written with something a little less ordinary. Molly moved around the desk and opened the drawers. Alec came to stand beside her.

  Molly removed the top drawer, felt beneath it and then riffled through the contents. Alec glanced at Barnes, who was watching her intently. Molly had that effect on people, Alec thought.

  ‘Office stationery,’ Molly said. ‘Headed notepaper and compliment slips. Cheap, though, don’t you think?’

  Alec felt the texture of the paper. She was right, he thought, it was pretty ordinary. What had she been expecting? ‘Expensive-looking envelopes, though.’

  ‘True,’ Molly said.

  ‘Maybe they just want to make a good first impression. They reckoned no one would take notice of cheap notepaper if it came in a fancy envelope.’

  She replaced the drawer and opened the next. Checked beneath it as she had done before. A cashbox containing two ten pound notes and a handful of coins. A stack of receipts for petrol and one for a cheap mobile phone. Alec leafed through them, found another two for mobile phones.

  The third drawer was empty but for a woollen scarf and a pair of gloves, a scatter of coins and paperclips and the sort of debris that, in Alec’s experience, was found at the bottom of any office drawer.

  Molly moved on to the filing cabinet, riffling though but with little apparent focus.

  ‘Anything of interest in the folders?’ Alec asked.

  ‘Not that I know about. They’ve been checked over, but left in situ. There’s someone from the Home Office coming to take a look, and they stipulated we leave them where they are, which is why they are still here and not in some evidence box, gracing some poor PCs desk right now.’

  Molly flicked through the folders, glancing now and then at the contents, but making no comment. Finally, she slid the drawer closed and stood back.

  ‘Your man from the Home Office will find nothing,’ she declared. ‘He’s being sent just to make it all look official. Anything important will already have gone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Barnes asked her.

  ‘I mean this place will already have been cleaned out. That will have happened, at the latest, as soon as Gilligan and Hayes had been positively identified, but my guess would be it had already been given the once over by whoever put them in that van.’

  Barnes shifted uncomfortably. ‘You can’t know that,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t know it, but I can guess.’ Molly sighed. ‘Right, let’s take a look downstairs.’

  They returned to the reception area and then to the office previously occupied by Hayes. There, Molly repeated her search, but Alec could see that this was the same performance as she had given at the storage locker. ‘There’ll be nothing here of interest,’ she said. ‘I’ll make a bet that half the files are missing and what’s left is just fragments of what should be there. There’ll be nothing left that’s of any use to anyone; it will all be gone.’

  ‘What exactly did Gilligan and Hayes do?’ Alec asked.

  Molly shrugged. ‘Whatever paid best and for whatever master could offer them the most profit,’ she said. ‘Gilligan was an expert in international law and Hayes specialized in bringing cases of abuse against government bodies on behalf of individuals.’

  ‘Some sort of human rights lawyer,’ Barnes suggested.

  ‘You could call him that.’ Molly seemed amused. ‘But the way he dealt was more like those adverts you see. You know the ones, have you had an accident, no win no fee … except that Hayes always took his fee, win or not. If not in cash then in some other way. Not that he ever lost.’ She paused for a moment and then said, ‘If you think of him as some sort of international ambulance chaser, you’d be closer to the mark.’

  ‘And your friend, Joseph Bern, was he in the same business?’

  Molly frowned. ‘I like to think that Joseph also had a sense of honour,’ she said. ‘That he used Gilligan and Hayes as a front, as a means to an end, but—’ She shrugged. ‘Joseph was a survivor, and survivors tend to be pragmatic. He left the business maybe ten years ago, so I couldn’t really say.’

  ‘But you seem to be aware of what kind of operation Gilligan and Hayes ran,’ Barnes persisted.

  ‘Beca
use sometimes even slime can be a good lubricant,’ Molly said. ‘They had contacts and expertise and though Edward and I regarded them with the same distaste most people reserve for said slime, they could, on occasion, be useful. We referred people to Joseph from time to time and after Joseph retired we made occasional use of Gilligan and Hayes.’

  ‘For what kind of thing?’ Barnes asked. ‘And those files, are they still here?’

  Molly smiled at him, her expression indulgent. ‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘How do you think I can be so certain that the place has already been searched? Now, I’d like my lunch and before that I need to use the bathroom. I take it that’s allowed?’

  Barnes frowned, but then nodded and Molly headed back up the stairs. Alec heard the stairs creak and then the door open and close.

  ‘Do you think she’s right?’ Barnes asked.

  ‘I’d bet on it. I’ll also bet you’ll get nothing useful out of her about what cases she did refer. Molly is used to keeping secrets. If you push she’ll just clam up even tighter.’

  Barnes wandered over to the window and looked down at the street as Alec had done earlier. Alec took the opportunity to call Naomi on her mobile. She and Liz were also about to go and have lunch. She sounded relaxed and happy, Alec thought as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. At least one of them was having a decent day.

  Molly returned a moment or two later and they left, locking up carefully. Molly watched, hawklike, as Barnes set the alarm, and something about the tension in her body set alarm bells ringing in Alec’s mind. Then she took his arm and squeezed it tight.

  ‘It’s been nice seeing you, Alec, even if the circumstances are far from ideal,’ Molly said.

  ‘Something is wrong, here,’ Alec said, but Molly’s fingers, digging deep into his flesh warned him that now was not the time and neither was the company. Feeling foolish, but somehow still in the older woman’s thrall, even as he had been in childhood, Alec held his peace.